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Program Notes
Part of the cultural fallout in Western Europe just after the First World War was the conviction that Romanticism had to be expunged from contemporary artistic life. Assorted ideologies, theories and techniques, often colliding with one another, were offered as tools for this purpose, and Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), then the boy wonder of German music, investigated a considerable number of them in his wildly eclectic compositions. What with atonal dabbling, nose-thumbing at bourgeois values via jazzy sitcom operas and so on, it was no wonder, when the National Socialists came to power in 1933, the archmoralist Adolf Hitler declared Hindemith a cultural Bolshevist.
 By the mid-twenties, however, Hindemith was beginning to settle on a compositional approach congruent with the "New Objectivity" of the time; for him it meant avoidance of feverish program music in favor of vigorous, motive-based counterpoint in a modern harmonic contextÑ a new music and yet rooted in German tradition (Brahms back to Beethoven, Bach and before.) In rapid succession, he created chamber music, chamber concerti (Kammermusik), song sets and operas, all up to date attention-grabbers. As a result of his increasing fame, Hindemith received the offer of a commission from Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. The result was the centerpiece of three works called Konzertmusik, op. 48-50 (1930), each for a larger ensemble than was usual in his music at that time. Opus 49 features concertante piano with two harps and ten brass instruments, thus offering distinctive opportunities in timbral exploration, a feature otherwise rare in Hindemith's work. The initial melody is shared by solo brass and piano, the latter responsible eventually for a canonic middle theme accompanied by low register harps. In the surging fugue which ensues, the piano only reluctantly allows the brass to participate, despite their intrusive blasts; but following some motivic dialogue, a spectacular brass stretto dominates until near the end, thus reversing the earlier piano-brass relationship. The motives and harmonic flavor of an intricate, ethereal theme are the basis for three very free variations for harps and piano in the next movement. In the finale, a quiet episode begun by piano alone is noted by the composer to be "after an old folksong", one of several tunes he borrowed over the years from an Altdeutsches Liederbuch (ed. F. Böhme, 1877). The contrapuntal presentation is anything but folklike, of course.
Hindemith's prime creative focus during this period, however, was not on large concert works, as was made clear in a letter written on May 8, 1930 to Mrs. Coolidge in response to her inquiry about the commission. He agreed in principle to the composition of such a work, but then wrote: "To be sure, there still exist for me a few obstacles. In recent years, I have almost entirely turned away from concert music and composed nearly exclusively music with pedagogical or social tendencies; for amateurs, children, broadcast, mechanical instruments, etc. I hold this sort of composition to be more important than writing for concert uses because the latter usually serve only as a technical task for the musicians and have hardly anything to do with the advancement of music."
While the declaration in part may have served a business purpose (he then asked for a sizeable stipend), it reflects Hindemith's concern that composers not distance themselves from the larger community, a conviction that had grown during the late twenties into a sense of the artist's responsibility to society. Compositionally, this was manifest in what he called Sing- und Spielmusik (music to sing and play), that is, new music performable by children and amateurs, sometimes labeled Gebrauchsmusik (music for use). One of his more elaborate products for this purpose, the 1932 Plöner Musiktag (music day in Plön), contains four groups of pieces to be performed during the course of a single school day. The Morgenmusik (morning music), a sort of wake-up call in the tower music tradition of ancient Germany, consists of three brief but sturdy movements.
In 1927, Hindemith startled his friends by accepting a teaching position with the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Surely, he already had quite enough to do then in his professional life. Not only a major figure in new music as a composer, he was leader and violist of the Amar String Quartet, and an indefatigable promoter of contemporary music by no means limited to his own. Nevertheless, the job had prestige and brought him to Berlin, the center of German musical life.
In retrospect, it must have seemed inevitable that, as the very archetype of the complete musician, Hindemith would become a successful pedagogue. With characteristic humor and thoroughness (in 1922 he had written, "I've got a chronic mania for work, and doubt if I'll ever get rid of it"), he threw himself into his new task. His methodical mindset, coupled to his sense of composer responsibility, subsequently led him to begin a magnificent series of solo sonatas, in essence an artistic Gebrauchsmusik for professional musicians. As early as 1918, Hindemith privately had expressed an interest in exploring the expressive and formal ranges of the genre. Having already composed several sonatas for keyboard instruments and strings, he set out to supply comparable works for all orchestral instruments, starting with the flute and piano sonata of 1936. Sonatas for clarinet, horn, trumpet, and harp appeared on his publisher's desk in 1939, an especially fruitful year.
The Sonata for Trombone and Piano, a worthy continuation of the series, appeared in 1941. An extraordinarily difficult piano part relentlessly supports the stentorian trombone through themes and development until interrupted by a novel allegretto in which piano variations alternate with an unvaried trombone refrain. Another borrowed melody, the Lied des Raufbolds (Song of the Ruffian or Swashbuckler) actually consists of two tunes twice tooted. Finally, the last movement development is allowed to proceed, culminating in a truly emphatic recapitulation of the opening theme.
--Wallace |
